The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP

CHAPTER 3. “Yours in a Glorious Cause”: The Investigator

CHAPTER 3 “Yours in a Glorious Cause” The Investigator Bruised, battered, but not broken in spirit, after hours of this ghastly turmoil, 119 women were arrested, and those who were not went home to patch themselves up . . . Yours in a glorious cause. —Elisabeth Freeman, “Letter from an American” 63 O N September 15, 1911, Elisabeth Freeman, a twenty-six-year-old American woman from New York, returned to New York City on the steamship Baltic after six years in England.1 In a speech she gave at Convention Hall in Buffalo two weeks later, Freeman explained to her audience how a “few months vacation abroad” had lengthened into six years overseas because of her passionate involvement in the British women’s suffrage movement as one of Emmeline Pankhurst’s “militant” suffragettes.2 The Buffalo Courier reporter who covered Freeman’s September 29, 1911, speech, obviously quite taken with the fiery young speaker, describes her as “a slip of a blonde young woman—sweet faced, eyes alight with the fires of resolution and consecration to a cause.” The journalist representing the Buffalo Express at the same event comments that young Miss Freeman took the stage at Convention Hall following a fashion show. Many of the women in attendance had come only to see the fashions, but they were tempted to stay on after the moderator announced “a speaker who suffered the tortures of an English jail.” When the slight young woman came out on the stage, the whisper ran around the hall, “My she does not look a bit militant!”3 Elisabeth Freeman was indeed “sweetfaced ,” petite and dainty, only weighing about 110 pounds.4 Photographs of her con- firm the fact that she was a young woman with refined, delicate features and carefully groomed hair and clothing. But, despite her dissimilarity to the popular image at the time of the outspoken suffragist as a hatchet-faced, Carrie Nation–style shrew, Freeman was also a seasoned and unrelenting militant in the battle for women’s suffrage . She may have gone to Europe as a young American woman of leisure on vacation, but she returned as a kind of suffragist soldier of fortune— restless, devoted to her cause beyond any other attachment, and ready to go anywhere to rouse women to action and help them win the vote. Freeman’s history in the movement, according to her own testimony, stretches back to 1905, but there is no way of knowing what speech she might have heard, which woman she might have met, or what street demonstration she might have seen in England that originally inspired her to take up the cause. By the time she appears in the pages of the Woman’s Journal, the organ of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), in August 1910— one year before her return to America—she had already given so much time to the suffragist cause in England that she had been chosen to lead the American delegation in an enormous parade of women through the streets of London on July 23, 1910.5 On this particular summer day in London, the crowds who watched the massive women’s parade were friendly and supportive. Even the police, said one observer, were “the best-natured, most kindly officers I have ever seen.”6 According to official estimates, as many as a million people crowded into Hyde Park at the end of the march to hear the suffragist speakers. The park was Chapter 3 64 Elisabeth Freeman. Inscriptions on the back of three identical copies of this photo read, “Elizabeth [sic] Freeman of New York. Working with the Garment workers in New York. Went through the Ohio campaign with Rosalie Jones.” Courtesy National Woman’s Party Records, Group 1, Box 161, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. packed with people—an ocean of upturned faces in every direction as far as the speakers could see. But on the very day of the triumphal women’s march to Hyde Park, Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, an implacable enemy of women’s suffrage, announced that the Conciliation Bill, the bill for women’s suffrage, would not be given a third reading in Parliament. The failure to schedule a third reading meant the bill would not be passed, despite the support of a large majority of members of Parliament.7 The increasingly violent clashes between Asquith’s Liberal Party government and the “suffragettes” of...